A Cafe Racer Conversion - 1981 BMW R65 (Cape Town): 23 January 2015 - Two weeks' worth of blog (Cape Town Cafe Racer)

I've let too much time pass between updates and now I don't know where the hell to begin...

Let's start with a list - you can't go wrong with a list.

Things that are complete:

Main frame, wheel rims and various other parts have been bead blasted and painted black - it looks rad;
The carburetors have been serviced and made pretty. Oscar came up with a cool idea to switch the carburetors so that the choke and throttle levers are facing outwards. We're not sure if this is going to work yet, but it looks cool as hell;
Oscar has replaced the standard choke with a miniature lever attached directly to keep the ugly choke switch off the handlebars. This was a helluva mission.
Replaced air filter box with cone filters.
The handlebar clamps on the yoke have been grinded off as we'll be using clip-ons, and both the upper and lower triple tree plates have been polished to perfection. Oscar created an anti-vibration mount for the Acewell digital speedo.

We decided to keep a lot of the parts as untreated aluminium, which means the last two weeks have consisted mainly of sanding and polishing parts to smooth the rough surface created by the sand casting. It's painstaking stuff... starting with 150 grit, working through, 320, 600 to 1000 and then finally using a polishing wheel.

We've had lots of trouble with bearings this week... We're still struggling to get the bearing race out of the steering head. We've tried a number of not very graceful methods with no luck. Apparently the best way to do this is to weld around the inside of the race, and when it cools down and contracts it pops out on its own... So Oscar's gone to hire a welding machine today to try this out.

On the other hand something cool that we achieved with a bearing this week was the fitting of the new bearing on the steering stem. We put the bottom plate in the freezer for an hour or two, then stuck the bearing in the oven for half an hour and the thing just slid right on (you could barely even fit it over the top before).

We've had two different seats moulded which we'll hopefully be trying out this weekend. Once we've chosen a seat we can chop the subframe to fit. Lot's of other bits and bobs being grinded, sanded, polished, machined, cleaned, stripped etc. in the background.

We've just started with the rebuild, but very superficially - we just attached the two stands to the frame :) After all the frustration with the bearings we needed a small win!

I've been a bit of a kak partner due to having a ridiculous workload recently. While I failed in my one job to sand and polish the lower brace (triple tree), Oscar's used his ADD powers to just about sand and polish every part to sparkly perfection.

As a side note, Oscar's got cuts and bruises all over and I think he's developing an oil stain tan. He called me a pussy after I insisted on wearing (motorcross) goggles the first time I grinded something because he'd removed the safety guard... in my defense they only stayed on for 5 minutes.

We still haven't touched the engine yet...